big dig

Later on today at 5pm I’ll be a guest on DuEwa Frazier’s web radio show, Rhymes, Views & News—feel free to call in!

I didn’t sleep well last night; was up late poring over my mother’s family tree and corresponding with her first cousin, Carolin, up in Ontario Alberta.  If you watched Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. you know that family histories aren’t always factually accurate.  We’re trying to compare notes and come up with an exact date—I have 1820 in my head as the year my African American ancestors left Philadelphia and migrated to Canada.  According to what my grandmother told me, two younger brothers of Bishop Richard Allen bought their freedom and went north.  But wasn’t slavery in PA mostly over by 1820?  Now it seems there’s another, more plausible version, which is that my ancestor (John Allen) was actually the son of Bishop Allen’s eldest brother, John.  It doesn’t help that they keep recycling all the family names—endless Richards and Johns and Sarahs.  I stayed up til midnight then succumbed to a headache and went to bed.  Couldn’t fall asleep, of course.  Now I’ve got this photo (above) of my great-grandfather (Richard Allen) pinned to my bulletin board.  He looks about 8-10 years old in this photo, and you can see his older sister Annie is quite fair.  Family legend says that their father, James Henry Allen, wouldn’t allow his photo to be taken because he felt his descendants would one day be ashamed of his “dark skin.”  Even if that story’s true, I find it hard to believe that James was dark-skinned; even with a very fair white wife, he couldn’t likely have produced so many children who could virtually pass for white.  So what did James Henry look like?  We’ll never know, probably.  This is a photograph of his wife, Ellen.  She and her sister married two Allen brothers in the 1850s and were effectively cut off from their family—some relatives even changed their surname to avoid being linked to black people!  When I write my novel about my family, I will take no prisoners…I won’t worry about offending Canadians’ delicate sensibilities around race.  I’m so grateful for Cousin Carolin and all my other white-identified relatives who refuse to stand with white supremacy…